So Dana Dirr was a pretty amazing woman.
Mother of eleven children, Dana was also a trauma surgeon at a Canadian hospital.
But, the night before Mother's Day, tragedy struck.
She was hit by a drunk driver.
And worse – she was pregnant at the time.
Dana was rushed to hospital, and gave birth, but died soon after.
To make matters even worse, one of the children she left behind, a seven-year-old boy, had
cancer.
He was pretty close to death, and his family had been blogging about his struggles for
years.
After Dana’s death, her husband JS, a Canadian Mountie, went on Facebook and wrote this unbelievably
beautiful post about his dead wife.
That post went viral on Facebook.
What a shame it was entirely made up.
Okay, I think you need to elaborate a little bit.
So this Dirr family never existed.
A women Emily faked the entire thing.
This is my friend Joel Werner, you might remember him from previous episodes of BrainCraft.
He produced a podcast on this story.
So my story starts with this woman from Chicago, Taryn Harper Wright, she's a self proclaimed
hoax hunter.
She goes online and tracks down people who are faking illness.
And she found this story about the Dirr family and did a reverse Google image search of the
images that she'd used on her blog and found that they weren't from Canada, they were from
all over the place, like as far away as a Mummy blog in South Africa.
So this one woman Emily controlled all of these social media profiles that had been
operating, and pulled all the strings.
She was like a puppeteer.
So Emily was suffering from what's known as Munchausen Syndrome.
It's a psychiatric disorder about pretending to be sick, faking illness.
The Munchausen refers to Baron Munchausen, a real person renowned for the outlandish
stories he would tell.
So much so, he became a character in works of fiction as well.
Munchausen Syndrome involves convincing people in the real world that you're sick when actually,
you're not.
Which is pretty hard to do.
Imagine that you have to go to a doctor or an emergency room and have a detailed knowledge
of your symptoms and a disease progression.
In extreme cases, people actually make themselves sick.
And these people aren't faking illness to get money, which is a really important point,
this fraud; it's just the attention that people with Munchausen Syndrome get is really, really
gratifying.
It's a type of sympathy and care that these people don't get in any other way.
And the extent of this syndrome has grown over time.
So in the 90s, psychiatrist Dr. Marc Feldman recognised an online variant of Munchausen
Syndrome and he called it Munchausen by Internet.
Now Munchausen by Internet is super easy.
Whereas with Munchausen proper you've got to learn the symptoms and go in person in
real life and convince these doctors and nurses and medical staff that you're sick, online
you just go to Web MD or where ever, copy and paste the symptoms, put them on your Facebook
or blog.
If you get caught out, you just shut down the account and move on.
So how can you tell when someone is faking an illness online?
First up a really weird one: twins.
Apparently people who fake illness online make up that twins are involved.
No one really knows why, but twins.
Red flag.
A more obvious one is inconsistencies in information.
So people forget the lies they tell, so look out for names changing especially siblings
or uncles names changing, anything in their story that doesn't hold over time, big red
flag.
I guess their lies are pretty complex.
Yeah totally, and if you're managing the accounts of 30 fake people on Facebook you're going
to forget a few details here and there.
Also, plagiarism.
Like I said before, people often just copy and paste symptoms, so if something is recognizably
from somewhere else online, maybe that person's faking.
And drama.
Drama's the big one.
Like these people love attention.
The reason they do this is because they're craving the attention they get from it.
So if they're escalating these ridiculous scenarios, they're getting miracle cures,
they're having near death experiences all the time, maybe it's a red flag.
And if these claims are challenged, I guess people could create another persona, like
a fake family or friend to back up what they're saying online.
But all of these accounts are controlled by the one person.
So Taryn will confront people that she thinks are faking illness online, but before you
go out and do some hoax hunting yourself, just remember there are ethics to consider
here.
If you get it wrong, you end up accusing someone with a life-threatening illness of faking
it.
Even if you get it right, you're still going to accuse someone who is suffering from a
pretty serious mental health issue.
These are tricky waters to navigate.
So Taryn only accuses people she is 100% convinced are faking?
And she's never had a false positive.
So she's never actually gone out and accused someone who then has turned out to have cancer.
So I feel like it's important to point out that Taryn only accuses people she's 100%
sure are faking, and she's given them a private opportunity to come clean.
But keep in mind, support groups and message boards and Facebook groups, these can be really
useful resources for people who are going through serious illness.
So don't let your experience be ruined just because a couple of people might be faking
illness.
Like Dana Dirr.
I can't help but feel that the real victims are Munchausen Syndrome are you guys, people
on the internet that get drawn into these characters and these pages and think these
are real.
Because people invest their own energy and time into the story, only to find out that
this other person, who they thought was their friend is actually a fake.
And for some people when they discover that this is all a hoax, it's devastating.
In his book, Playing Sick, Marc Feldman says that Munchausen patients travel continually
to find new theaters in which to display their craft.
For more, check out Joel's podcast.
He has a story on the Health Report and there's a link down in the description.
The 'Munchausen' refers to Baron Munchausen, a real person renowned for the outlandish
stories he would tell.
So much so, he became a character in works of fiction as well.
In his book Playing Sick, Marc Feldman says that Munchausen patients travel continually
to find new theaters in which to display their craft.